Small gems of irritated hope

I seem to have a fascination with pearls. Not in real life so much as in a symbolic way. As jewelry, I think pearls are okay…I would frankly like to own some, but I’m afraid I’m more attracted to shiny, multifaceted things. And yet pearls keep popping up in my poetry, time and time again. By now everyone knows how pearls are made, a tiny irritating grain of sand or shell that an oyster deposits calcium carbonate onto over and over again in an effort to protect itself. What captures me, and I think other people as well, is the idea that something so beautiful and valuable is formed out of an oyster’s discomfort–and I have no idea just how much pain an oyster can feel, really, but at the very least it’s not a happy situation for the poor creature. It is literally impossible that a genuine pearl be created out of a good situation. This has a very personal and profound application for me, as I often feel I’ve been fighting alot of hopeless battles in my life. I don’t know that I’ve produced any pearls of value yet, but there is the hope that someday I will look back at my life with a handful of pearls and believe that it was worth it to become something beautiful. I wrote the following poem about that. I will be posting other poems involving pearls later…

Dialogue with Myself at 80 Years

I crave your wisdom.
I want to see the pearls
that my tears turn into, gathered
in the cup of your time-weary hands,
the small gems of irritated hope.
I will not dare to ask you
for the future
—my need for certainty is no right
to change who you might become—
but I want the weight of your life,
the crystallized promise of my pain,
in my palms
for the decisions I must face.

Exploring Nature has been a big part of my life since I was very young. Spring & Summer weekends, my dad would pack the entire family into our awful maroon tank of a car and go find some patch of wilderness buried in the city to  have a picnic. The best part came after the food and frisbee, when we would go exploring, hiking back into the Texas hill country on overgrown trails or finding our own way. At Bull Creek, we discovered a huge colony of Daddy-Long-Legs among the boulders across the creek; my first up-close-and-personal encounter with a crawdad; a waterfall that fell from a ledge that jutted several feet out from the hillside, so that you could easily walk behind it. At St. Edward’s, there were the stepping stones across the river beneath the small dam, Eagle Mt., the huge meadow where we watched the deer–my dad would wake us up at 4am just so we could get there in time to see them.  This love of Nature permeated my childhood–most of our vacations were built around such excursions. We went to Estes Park, CO twice, and both times are among my favorite memories. I love the big horn sheep, the yellow-bellied marmots, the profusion of waterlilies on Nymph Lake, the hike around Glacier Lake, the terrifyingly narrow and windy Trailridge Road that takes you all the way up into the tundra. In New Mexico, I fell madly in love with the sound the wind makes through aspen trees. My parents bought books on native wildflowers that accompanied us on all our trips. When my parents looked at new houses, my brother and I came along and spent most of the time tramping down the hills and fields behind the housing development. Our parents called us “mountain goats.” We went to the beach a number of times on vacation, too, but my first love was always the mountains, the wilderness. After my dad died, we stopped doing this as a family, but it is something I have carried into adulthood with me.  At college, I discovered this wonderful little creek that ran beneath one of the science buildings at the edge of campus. No one else knew about it, and I went there nearly every day while the weather was good, just to sit on the rocks with my feet dangling in the water and sing and write poetry and pray, watching the crawdads and tiny fish swimming amongs the wild rice in the current. I hated that school fiercely and there were alot of really stressful things in my life at that time, but I remember those warm, quiet afternoons as some of the best in my life. Luckily, I married a man who enjoys this sort of thing just as much as I do. On our honeymoon, between Spokane and Bellingham  we visited Dry Falls, Deception Falls, and took a very interesting detour down Aeneas Valley Road. Just in case anyone wants to try that, it is NOT a shortcut, you should probably be in a pickup or SUV, don’t plan on bathroom breaks for at least an hour and a half, but it’s a lot of fun anyway. Great way to explore some backroads that probably most people in the state of WA don’t know about. One of our favorite things to do is go for a drive, digital camera in hand (unlike my family, who took the camera on vacations but not often on shorter trips around the hill country) and try to find an area we’ve never explored before. I’ve lived in Spokane for five years now, my husband most of his life, and we’re still surprised by a new road out to Mt. Spokane or another rural valley tucked back behind the mountains–places that aren’t that far away, and not hard to find, but they somehow manage to remain secret from most people living around here. Sean and I took these pictures at Easter in Finch Arboretum.

The beauty of everyday things

I tend to think of my life as small, boring, unimportant. I have friends who are getting degrees in archaeology, who have spent months in Australia, Japan, Uruguay, and Spain. I am constantly reading magazine articles about the boundless inspiration discovered by artists and writers who go on retreats in Italy or France, and I look at my very plain life and wonder if I will ever experience anything so vibrant and inspiring.

And yet, it’s there. It’s the lunar eclipse that I’m going to wake up at 3:30 tomorrow morning to see; the quintuple rainbow over the valley as we buried my baby bunny; the milky, pastel pink sunset light filtering through wispy clouds on a drive down to Portland; standing in my driveway in the middle of a Texas thunderstorm; bluebonnet hunting in the hill country, where the fields are ablaze with wildflowers. Yes, my life is very small, very contained–but there is joy in these simple, everyday things. This is a truth I want to recapture, make part of who I am.

In my high school Creative Writing class, I had the privelege of seeing an interview with the poet Naomi Nye. She talked about how much of her poetry concentrates on common objects, a thimble or a button or a broom, and how she found these things fascinating, beautiful. At the time, I dismissed the idea completely–after all, how interesting is a button, really? But then I heard her read some of her poems aloud, and they came alive for me. The idea of beauty in everyday things captured me. Seven years later, she is still one of my favorite poets.

Valentine for Ernest Mann
by Naomi Nye

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

 

A brief introduction

My original blog (on Xanga) was intended to be a place where I could be myself, an outlet for the quirkier aspects of my personality that have, in recent years, been trampled down somewhat. That blog has since faded into the netherworld, but NOT the need for something to remind me of who I am, underneath the health problems etc. that try to redefine me. 

And so I launch Winged Paths version 2.0 as a re-focusing of my vision, a rediscovery and a reminder of self, an expression of my creative passions, a way to get my wings back and fly beyond the things that chain me.

Please be patient with me as I try to get this blog really going; things are very hectic, and as excited as I am to stretch my wings, there already isn’t enough time in the day. But I will do my best!